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Sunday, September 12, 2010

Two Years Later, Heather Mallick Still Playing the Victim

Apparently, Heather Mallick's relocation in employment from the CBC to the Toronto Star has had the precise effect so many Canadians expected it would.

It emboldened Mallick, to the extent that she actually thinks she can re-write the history of her career.

For the most part, Mallick regurgitates half-considered complaints about Fox News. Her basic argument is that Sun TV will be bad because Fox News is bad. (No, really -- that's the extent of the argument to date.)

Some of her complaints are so hashed-over that they're actually rather comical:

"Fox celebrates ignorance and fosters hate, it’s your weasel heart, that chunk of you that spurts endorphins when a hated rival crashes his car on Ambien or is caught with a gerbil where a gerbil shouldn’t be. It’s a poison tree. Weirdly transfixing as Glenn Beck is, when you eat the Fox apple, it eats away at you.

And it’s a news cartoon. When real journalists make a mistake, we feel a sickness in our soul. It’s humiliating, it should, and will be, publicly corrected and so-workers avert their eyes. Fox isn’t like that. They seemingly make up numbers, flying unburdened through their fenced-in no-fact zone."

Mallick also complains about a previous run-in with Bill O'Reilly during his famed attempt at a boycott of Canada.

Other than that, the substance of Mallick's argument is that Fox is bad because she says it is. More or less.

Of course, that isn't all Mallick has to say about Fox News. She apparently thinks that this is an opportunity to re-write the history of her career, when she broke a Mighty Wind, and wound up sharting all over her journalistic reputation:

"When Sarah Palin appeared at the Republican convention in 2008, I wrote about her honestly, an online CBC.ca column that would have disappeared into the ether as usual, except Fox News found out about it. I said Palin was a dangerous idiot. It made me the target of the worst Americans and Canadians, men with a violent hatred of (see list above). The attack was organized, as all Internet attacks are. And online anonymous hate is like a poison gas.

It was the same as my previous experience with Fox, but hotter and filthier. I’m happy to be called a pig by Greta Van Susteren, whatever. But this time people, really were hunting not just me, but friends, which made me frantic with guilt and fear. They were trying to find out where I lived. I’m only writing this now because I’m in a building with security guards."

Of course, Mallick didn't merely say that Palin is a "dangerous idiot". She also wrote:

"...Republican men, sexual inadequates that they are..."

"...She isn't even female really."

"John Doyle, the cleverest critic in Canada, comes right out and calls Palin an Alaska hillbilly. Damn his eyes, I wish I'd had the wit to come up with it first. It's safer than 'white trash' but I'll pluck safety out of the nettle danger. Or something."

"Palin has a toned-down version of the porn actress look ..."

"Bristol has what is known in Britain as the look of the teen mum, the 'pramface.' Husband Todd looks like a roughneck; Track, heading off to Iraq, appears terrified. They claim to be family obsessed while being studiously terrible at parenting."

"The conventioneers are nothing like the rich men who run the party, and that's the mystery of the hick vote."

"Republicans dream of a personal future that involves only household staff, not equals who need to be persuaded to vote."

The sad thing is that this is quite literally the most substantive comment in Mallick's hate-filled rant. The rest of it is basically filler. Terse, brutal, hateful, unreadable filler.

Perhaps Mallick actually feels vindicated to have been swept out of the CBC's dunce corner -- where the CBC promptly parked her after doing the responsible thing and removing her column from the website (although Mallick still maintains the source of her shame on her own site) -- and into the loving arms of the Toronto Star.

But like so many columnists at the Toronto Star, she isn't there because she produces quality work. Quite the contrary. Mallick is at the Star because she produces rhetoric that is ideologically soothing to the far left. Those like Mallick who are filled with an irrational, seething, and soul-consuming hatred of anyone who doesn't share their views, find her vitriolic invective especially soothing.

And no matter how many cues life sends her, Mallick never seems to figure out what her problem is:

"Being the target of Internet swarming is paranoia-producing and lonely-making. I got no sympathy from girlfriends—they eat for comfort like normal people—for my subsequent weight loss. I spent the winter not eating and thinking gloomy thoughts."

Apparently it's never occured to Mallick that she never received any sympathy from her friends because they examined what she wrote and found it to be genuinely repulsive. God knows that every single sane individual who wrote it -- including Dr Jeffrey Kargel of the Obama campaign -- recognized precisely this.

As for Mallick's gloomy thoughts, one can only imagine precisely hateful those thoughts must have been.

The rest of Mallick's column basically consists of the vapid, razor-thin rhetoric she specializes in. For the most part, the entire column consists of her substance-free ravings.

The only thing worth noting in her column is her complete inability to ever admit having done anything wrong. Heather Mallick is the classical lunatic far-leftist who would never dream of taking responsibility for her actions.

That she would seek to portray herself as a victim two years after her hateful Mighty Wind hit piece is purely indicative of that.